Echoes from a Distant Battlefield

THE WAR AT HOME The family of Jonathan P. Brostrom, who was killed at Wanat. From left: Brostrom’s mother, Mary Jo; his father, David, a retired colonel; and his brother, Blake, a lieutenant.

When First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom was killed by Taliban fighters in 2008, while attempting a heroic rescue in a perilously isolated outpost, his war was over. His father’s war, to hold the U.S. Army accountable for Brostrom’s death, had just begun. And Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund’s war—to defend his own record as commander—was yet to come. With three perspectives on the most scrutinized engagement of the Afghanistan conflict, one that shook the military to its foundations, Mark Bowden learns the true tragedy of the Battle of Wanat.

One man on the rocky slope overhead was probably just a shepherd. Two men was suspicious but might have been two shepherds. Three men was trouble. When Second Platoon spotted four, then five, they prepared to shoot.

Dark blue had just begun to streak the sky over the black peaks that towered on all sides of their position. The day was July 13, 2008. Captain Matthew Myer stood beside the driver’s-side door of a Humvee parked near the center of a flat, open expanse about the length of a football field where the platoon was building a new combat outpost, known as a COP. The vehicle was parked on a ramp carved in the rocky soil by the engineering squad’s single Bobcat, with its front wheels high so that its TOW missiles could be more easily aimed up at the sheer slopes to the west. The new outpost was hard by the tiny Afghan village of Wanat, at the bottom of a stark natural bowl, and the 49 American soldiers who had arrived days earlier felt dangerously exposed.

Myer gave the order for an immediate coordinated response with the platoon’s two heaviest weapons, the TOW system and a 120-mm. mortar, which sat in a small dugout a few paces west of the ramp, surrounded by HESCO barriers, canvas-and-wire frames that are filled with dirt and stone to create temporary walls. The captain was walking back to his command post, about 50 yards north, when the attack hit.

It was 20 minutes after four in the morning. Myer and Second Platoon, one of three platoons under his command scattered in these mountains, were at war in a place as distant from America’s consciousness as it was simply far away. Wanat lies high in the Hindu Kush at the southern edge of Nuristan Province, in Afghanistan’s rugged Northeast. Jagged mountains, reaching as high as 25,000 feet, tower over V-shaped valleys that angle sharply down to winding rivers. Wanat was at the confluence of the Waygal River and a small tributary. It was home to about 50 families, who carved out a spare existence on a series of green, irrigated terraces. A single partially paved road wound south toward Camp Blessing, the headquarters for Task Force Rock, Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. This battalion HQ was just five miles away in the fish-eye lens of a high-flying drone, but on the ground it was a perilous journey of about an hour—perilous because ambushes and improvised explosives were common. In Wanat it was easy to feel that you were hunkered down on the far edge of nowhere, fighting the only people in the world who seemed to badly want the place. You needed something like a graduate degree in geopolitics and strategy to have any idea why it was worth dying for.

Yet killing and dying—mostly killing—were what Task Force Rock was doing here. In army parlance, Afghanistan had become an “economy of force” action, which meant, in so many words, “make do.” The infrastructure-and-cultural-development projects that had arrived with the first wave of Americans, seven years earlier, had dried to a trickle. Ever since President Bush had followed up rapid military success in Afghanistan with a massive invasion of Iraq, in 2003, the nation’s attention had been riveted on Baghdad. But the war against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and like-minded local militias had never ended in these mountains. Small units of American soldiers were dug into scores of tiny, isolated combat posts, perched high on promontories, ostensibly projecting the largely theoretical Afghan central government into far-flung valleys and villages.

Second Platoon was part of Myer’s Chosen Company, the “Chosen Few,” who wore patches on their uniforms displaying a stylized skull fashioned after the insignia of the Marvel-comic-book character “Punisher.” Twenty-first-century America had staked its claim to this combat outpost in Wanat, punctiliously negotiating the lease of a piece of ground from village landlords. They had first occupied it in darkness, in a driving rain, just three days earlier.

Myer had arrived only the day before. He had sketched out a basic plan for the outpost, and then left supervision of the construction to First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, a cocky, muscular, and popular 24-year-old platoon leader from Hawaii. Brostrom had a long, slender face. He wore his dark-brown hair, as other soldiers did, in a buzz cut high and tight. After consultations with Myer and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, Brostrom had drawn up detailed maps of the new outpost on whatever scraps of paper he could find so that he could show his men sectors of fire for all of the vehicles, the placement of the claymore mines, and the location of fighting positions, the latrine, and everything else. A small force of Afghan contractors with heavy equipment were to handle most of the construction, but they had been delayed, awaiting the completion of a road-clearing mission. In the interim, the platoon itself had begun building the outpost’s preliminary defenses, toiling in 100-degree-plus heat with limited water and resources, hacking away at the baked, stubborn soil with picks and shovels, stringing razor wire, and filling the HESCOs as best they could—the Bobcat could not reach high enough to dump earth into the frames, so they had been cut down to just four feet.

The men had felt vulnerable in these first days. It wasn’t just that the outpost sat at the bottom of a giant bowl. There were also dead zones all around it where you couldn’t see. The ground dipped down just outside the perimeter, to a creek and to the road. The battalion headquarters could not provide the Wanat outpost with steady, overhead visual surveillance because of weather and limited availability of drones. Where the land sloped uphill to the northeast there was a bazaar and a mosque, together with other village buildings. It was as if Wanat were staring right down at them. There were just too many places for the enemy to hide.

Platoon sergeant David Dzwik shared the misgivings of his men. Dzwik was a puckish career soldier from Michigan who enlisted after starring on the gridiron in high school and realizing that he would never be able to sit still long enough to finish college. He had been in the army now for 13 years and planned to stay until retirement, even though the job meant spending precious little time at home with his wife and three kids. This was his second tour in Afghanistan. He had inherited the platoon-sergeant position when the previous man in that job, the man for whom this COP was named, Sergeant First Class Matthew Kahler, was killed by a shot fired by a “friendly” Afghan soldier.

Despite the precarious position the platoon now occupied, Dzwik had been forced to slow construction of defenses because of the extreme heat and limited water supplies. Gradually, as the stunted HESCOs were filled and as shallow excavations were chipped out, the position improved and Dzwik found himself hating it a little less. When Captain Myer arrived, on the fourth day, he was impressed by what had been accomplished but could see that the position was far from secure.

All of the fighting positions were makeshift. The command post was a sunken space about two feet deep, no larger than a big conference table, framed by Dzwik’s Humvee, a line of HESCOs, and the outer mud wall of a structure built to house the village bazaar. Looking south down the gently sloping ground was the TOW Humvee, parked on the ramp. Just west of that were two mortar positions shallowly excavated and surrounded by HESCO walls, and, farther south, toward the road, two more positions, the closer one marked by a Humvee, and beyond it an Afghan Army position, placed there to man the outer checkpoint on the road. There were several more dugout fighting positions to the north, and three larger positions at the northern edge manned by Afghan troops. Backing these men were two Humvees armed with Mk-19 grenade launchers.

The biggest problem was obvious: the platoon did not control the high ground. Every other outpost on this frontier had observation posts up in the hills to spot potential trouble. Regular foot patrols were mounted to make contact with the locals and to discourage hostile approaches. Lacking enough men for both construction and patrols, Brostrom had chosen to concentrate on construction. The platoon had conducted a perfunctory patrol to scout the immediate vicinity, but that was it. And the platoon had yet to establish a useful observation post.

It did have one somewhat elevated position, called Topside, which was visible to the northeast over the rooftops of the bazaar. It lay behind a maze of low sandbag walls and a loose perimeter of razor wire, and was manned by nine men. They had two M240 machine guns and a grenade launcher. Topside was midway up the lazy terrace steps and was set against three large boulders. Myer was not happy with it. It was not high enough to be very effective, and the men there were dangerously isolated from the main force. But he could understand Brostrom’s thinking. Any farther away and Topside would have been impossible to quickly reinforce. Until the promised contractors arrived and freed up more men to patrol, it was about as far away as the platoon dared to put it. As it was, Topside would be hard to defend if it came under attack.

Which it did, suddenly, on the morning of July 13. Two long bursts of machine-gun fire were followed immediately by a crashing wave of rocket-propelled grenades, or R.P.G.’s. It felt and sounded as if a thousand had come at them at once, from close range and continuing without letup. There were deafening blasts and fiery explosions on all sides. Myer judged that the first had come from behind the homes that looked down on them from Wanat, but soon enough they were coming from everywhere.

He ran to the command post, ducking behind cover and standing in the open door of his Humvee beside his radio operator, Specialist John Hayes, who had two FM radios, one tuned to the platoon’s internal net and the other to the battalion headquarters at Camp Blessing. “Whatever you can give me, I’m going to need,” Myer told headquarters calmly, the sound of gunfire and explosions in the background lending all the emphasis his words needed. “This is a Ranch House-style attack,” he said, referring to the worst single COP assault his men had experienced, a year earlier, at an outpost by that name farther north.

No one at Wanat expected this level of intensity to continue for long. Often a single big show of force—an artillery volley or a bomb dropped from an aircraft—would be enough to end things. The enemy would typically scatter. But Wanat was too remote to get fast help. The closest air assets were in Jalalabad, and it would be nearly an hour before airplanes or choppers would arrive. Reinforcements by road, from battalion headquarters, would take at least 45 minutes. The big guns at Blessing had to be pointed nearly straight up to lob shells over the mountains, which diminished their effectiveness, especially when the enemy was so close to the outpost. Some Taliban were in fact shooting from the outpost’s newly dug latrine, which was located on the western perimeter.

Myer directed artillery to fire around the perimeter of the outpost. It might not hit anyone, but it could make the enemy think twice.

“Hey, shoot these three targets,” he said, “then we can adjust them as needed.”

Before he had time to finish that order, the main source of enemy fire shifted to the northeast, toward Topside, which was getting hammered. Grenade explosions could be heard.

“We have to do something,” said Brostrom. The lieutenant knew the men at Topside were outgunned. “We have to get up there,” he said.

“O.K., go,” said Myer.

The impulse was typical of Brostrom. It had been an issue between him and his captain. Myer was six years older than the lieutenant, with five years of experience in warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw in Brostrom a tendency that many talented young officers had, to become too chummy with their men. He was always hanging around with them, lifting weights, joking. Brostrom had joined the army out of R.O.T.C. at the University of Hawaii, and, with his Oakley shades and surfer nonchalance, he wore the burdens of command lightly. He had once signed an e-mail to Myer “Jon-Boy,” which struck the West Point graduate as off-key. Of a piece, as Myer saw it, was Brostrom’s inclination to wade forward into a fight alongside his men. Much as that endeared him to the platoon, it was sometimes unwise. There had been times when Myer needed him at a command post and couldn’t find him.

“That’s not what your role is,” the captain explained after one firefight. “You need to be able to bring more than just an M4 to the fight. You have all these other assets that you bring, which is more firepower than the rest of the platoon combined.” Brostrom had acknowledged it, but this situation today was different. The need was urgent, and both officers knew it.

The lieutenant ran to the nearby fighting position of the platoon’s second squad. After a short consultation there, he took off with Specialist Jason Hovater and the platoon’s medic, Private William Hewitt. No sooner did they emerge from cover than Hewitt was hit by a round that blew a hole as big as a beer can out of the back of his arm. He crawled to cover and began bandaging himself. Brostrom and Hovater continued toward Topside.

The attackers were primarily targeting the platoon’s crew-served weapons. The Humvee with the TOW missile system had been hit hard right at the outset. Two R.P.G.’s hit the driver’s side, one setting the engine ablaze and the other exploding against the driver’s-side rear. A third R.P.G. exploded against the rear of the passenger side. The three-man team fled to take cover in the command post, leaving nine unfired missiles trapped in the inferno.

Dzwik had been walking over to the mortar pit when the shooting started. He was at the entrance when he heard the first shots, and in front of him Specialist Sergio Abad was hit by a round that clipped the backside of his body armor and entered his chest. He was still talking and breathing, but the wound was severe and would prove mortal. Attackers were now firing into the pit from the roofs of village dwellings and from a clump of trees just beyond the perimeter wire.

The platoon was used to exchanging fire with the enemy, but for many this was the first time they could actually see whom they were shooting at—and who was shooting at them. Some of the enemy fighters wore masks. They were dressed in various combinations of combat fatigues and traditional Afghan garments. The mortar crew fought back with grenades and small arms. They managed to fire off four mortar rounds before machine-gun fire began pinging off the mortar tube. One R.P.G. flew right through an opening in the HESCO wall, passing between Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips, the crew leader, and Private Scott Stenoski, then continued across the outpost to explode against the bazaar wall, setting it on fire. When an R.P.G. exploded inside the pit, injuring two more soldiers, Sergeant Phillips ordered everyone out. Carrying Abad, the men ran to the now jammed command post.

It was hard to believe that the enemy had so many grenades to shoot. Everyone kept waiting for a lull in the fighting, but it didn’t come. The village had clearly been in on the attack. There had been clues: unoccupied young men just sitting and watching the post under construction over the last few days. All of the soldiers had sensed that they were being sized up, but what could they do? They couldn’t shoot people just for sitting and watching. There had been a few warnings that an attack might be coming, but the platoon believed that they had time. Ordinarily the enemy would work up to a big attack: a small-unit assault on one position, a lobbed grenade, a few mortars from the distance. This is what experience had taught them to expect. Not a massive attack completely out of the blue.

Myer worked the radio furiously, trying to guide Camp Blessing’s artillery crews. Communication was spotty, because the destruction of the TOW Humvee had taken out the platoon’s satellite antenna. He was working up grids for aircraft and artillery, hoping to land a few big rounds to end this thing. He knew that Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund would have already dispatched a reaction force and would be steering in air support. Myer took stock of his assets. He guessed that the Taliban leaders believed they were too close to the perimeter for artillery rounds to be used effectively. If he could drop a few shells close enough to disabuse them, maybe they would break off.

He left cover briefly to check in at the two closest firing positions as rounds snapped nearby and R.P.G.’s homed in—he could actually see them approaching, arcing eerily toward the platoon from the distance. He was back inside the command post when the burning TOW Humvee exploded, throwing missiles in all directions. Two landed inside the command post. Phillips grabbed one, using empty sandbags to protect his hands from the hot shell, and carried it out under heavy fire, depositing it a safe distance away and then returning miraculously unharmed. Myer grabbed the other one and hurled it up and over the sandbag wall.

At the same time, six minutes into the fight, howitzer shells from faraway battalion headquarters began to fall, beginning with four big blasts on the southern and western sides of the outpost. Ostlund had delayed firing until he was able to confirm, with Myer, the location of every member of the platoon. He had the crews perform a mandatory recheck before each 155-mm. shell was fired. The barrage became a steady, slow, loud drumbeat. But it did not, as Myer had hoped, check the assault.

All of the fighting positions at the post were heavily and continually engaged at this point. The Afghan contingent, with its U.S. Marine trainers, was firing from its bunkers to the 11-o’clock and 5-o’clock positions with small arms and an M240 machine gun. The two Humvees with Mk-19 grenade launchers were unable to use them because the enemy was within the weapon’s minimum arming distance. The last of the platoon’s Humvees, at the lower position, had had its .50-caliber taken out early on.

So, only minutes into the fight, the platoon was left to defend the main outpost with small arms, shoulder-fired rockets, hand-thrown grenades, the .50-cal. machine gun mounted on Myer’s Humvee at the command post, and the M240 machine guns. The mortars and TOW system had all been destroyed. Much of the incoming fire was now concentrated on the command post and its big machine gun. The Humvee was taking a pounding.

“Where is my P.L.?” shouted Dzwik. “Where’s Lieutenant Brostrom?”

The veteran platoon sergeant and the laid-back platoon leader from Hawaii had been inseparable for months. Theirs was a familiar army relationship, the older, experienced sergeant charged with mentoring a younger, college-educated newbie who out-ranked him, and it was rarely frictionless. But Dzwik and Brostrom had clicked. They got along like brothers, with the platoon sergeant feeling both a personal and professional responsibility for his lieutenant. When Myer had chewed out the lieutenant for leaving the radio during that earlier firefight in order to shoot his weapon, Dzwik had been chewed out at the same time by the company’s first sergeant.

“Why the hell are you letting the P.L. get away from the radio?” the first sergeant asked. “You need to stop him from doing stupid stuff like that.”

But Brostrom was fun, and brought out Dzwik’s playful streak. Dzwik had taken him on as a friend and as a project. He was alarmed now to find him absent from the command post, and relieved to hear that he was absent this time with the captain’s permission.

“He went up to the OP,” said Myer.

Bad as things were at the main outpost, they were much worse at the observation post. All nine men at Topside had been either killed or wounded. Specialist Tyler Stafford had been blown backward by a blast, losing his helmet. Bits of hot shrapnel cut into his legs and belly, and at first, because of the burning sensation, he thought he was on fire. He pulled his helmet on again and called for help to his buddy, Specialist Gunnar Zwilling, who looked stunned. Then Zwilling disappeared in a second blast that blew Stafford down to the bottom terrace.

Specialist Matthew Phillips, the platoon’s marksman, was on his knees below a wall of sandbags nearby.

Phillips smiled over at him, as if to say he would be there in a moment. He then stood to throw a grenade just as another R.P.G. exploded. Stafford ducked and felt something smack hard against the top of his helmet, denting it. When the dust settled he looked up. Phillips was again on his knees but slumped forward, arms akimbo. He was dead.

Stafford crawled back up to Topside’s southernmost fighting position, where he found Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the platoon’s forward observer, severely wounded in the arms and legs. Alongside, Specialist Jason Bogar and Corporal Jonathan Ayers were putting up a heroic fight. Bogar had his Squad Automatic Weapon on cyclic, just loading and spraying, loading and spraying, until it jammed. The barrel was white-hot. Ayers worked an M240 machine gun from the terrace overhead until he ran out of ammo. He and Specialist Chris McKaig were also struggling to put out a fire inside their small fighting position. When Ayers’s ammo was gone, they fought back with their M4s, popping up at intervals to shoot short bursts until Ayers was shot and killed.

Under heavy fire, Brostrom and Hovater raced uphill along one wall of the lower portion of the bazaar, then to the outer wall of a small hotel. They scrambled up the first terrace. The lieutenant stood on the lower terrace, which was partly shielded by a boulder, and called up to the wounded Pitts, telling him to hand down the machine gun that Zwilling and Stafford had been using.

Stafford could not see Brostrom or Hovater, but he heard the lieutenant shouting back and forth with a third soldier who had joined them there, Specialist Pruitt Rainey. Then he heard one of them yell, “They’re inside the wire!”

There came a crescendo of gunfire and shouts. It was surmised later that Brostrom and Rainey had been trying to set up the machine gun, with Hovater providing covering fire, when they were surprised by Taliban fighters. All three were shot from the front and killed instantly.

The lieutenant’s battle was over. His bravery had little impact on the course of the fight. He could not rescue the men on Topside, and those who survived would have done so anyway. As it is with all soldiers who die heroically in battle, his final act would define him emphatically, completely, and forever. In those loud and terrifying minutes he had chosen to leave a place of relative safety, braving intense fire, and had run and scrambled uphill toward the most perilous point of the fight. A man does such a thing out of loyalty so consuming that it entirely crowds out consideration of self. In essence, Jon Brostrom had cast off his own life the instant he started running uphill, and only fate would determine if it would be given back to him when the shooting stopped. He died in the heat of that effort, living fully his best idea of himself.

The remaining soldiers at Topside, wounded, fought on. Eventually all but one, Sergeant Pitts, managed to tumble and crawl their way back downhill. Despite severe wounds to his legs and arms, Pitts managed to hurl grenade after grenade into the dead space alongside the perimeter, and stayed in radio contact with the command post until reinforcements finally came.

There was still an eternity of minutes for the living members of the platoon, but the worst for them was over when a B-1 dropped heavy bombs to the north, and then, not long afterward, Apache gunships began raining fire on the attackers. A short while later, the quick-reaction force arrived from Camp Blessing. The fight would rage on for hours, but the attackers bore the brunt of it now. Later inquiries would estimate that at least a third of the attacking force of 200 to 300 was killed or wounded. With the sun still behind the peaks to the east, Sergeant Dzwik organized nine men to follow him up to Topside.

They were still taking fire as they retraced Brostrom and Hovater’s path. As Dzwik crested the terrace, he saw bodies. For a few minutes, the shooting stopped. The scene was eerily calm. As the others fanned out to re-man the observation post and tend to the wounded, Dzwik took inventory. Eight of the day’s toll of nine killed lay here. Seven were dead, another mortally wounded.

Brostrom and Hovater were by the boulder. Dzwik noted that Brostrom’s mouth was open. It was a habit, one the platoon sergeant had nagged him about, telling him it made him look juvenile, or stupid. Brostrom had a comical way of carrying himself, sometimes deliberately presenting an attitude of the strong but dim ranger. Dzwik enjoyed his role as mentor and scold. Whenever he would catch Brostrom openmouthed, he was on him.

“Why is your mouth open?” he would ask. “You look retarded.”

“Shut up, man, that’s just how I am,” the lieutenant would say.

“Well, sir, I’m here to help you with that.”

Dzwik reached down and closed his mouth.

When the enemy fire kicked up again, Dzwik made it a point to hold his ground over his fallen friend, even when an R.P.G. exploded in the tree right above him. A piece of shrapnel tore a hole through his arm.

Before the sun finally rose over the peaks that morning, word of what had happened in this isolated valley had raced around the world. Nine Americans had been killed, and 32 members of the platoon—27 Americans and five allied Afghans—had been wounded. The Battle of Wanat was the army’s worst single day in the seven-year Afghan conflict, and it would send out waves of anger and recrimination that would last for years. For nine American families in particular, the pain will last a lifetime.

The casualties were reported on the radio by one of the returning Apache pilots.

“I have a total of nine K.I.A.,” he said, then added, “GODDAMMIT!”

II. The Father’s Battle

It was a Sunday morning in Aiea, Hawaii, so Mary Jo and Dave Brostrom went to Mass. Their home is perched high on a green hillside, and from the back the ground plunges into a verdant valley of palm branches. When a sudden storm sweeps through like a blue-gray shade, it will often leave behind rainbows that arch over the distant teal inlet of Pearl Harbor.

Its white monuments far below mark this as a military neighborhood, past and present. Camp H. M. Smith, headquarters for the U.S. Pacific Command, is just down the hill. The Brostroms are a military family. Dave is a retired colonel, an army aviator who served nearly 30 years with helicopter units. Their two sons, Jonathan and Blake, had gone the same way. Jonathan was a first lieutenant and Blake was in college with the R.O.T.C. program. So when Mary Jo, a petite woman with dark-brown hair and hazel eyes, saw a military van parked on Aiealani Place, their narrow residential street, she thought that somebody was misusing a government vehicle—the vans were not authorized for private use and, on Sunday, would ordinarily have been parked on the base. They drove past it, turned down their steep driveway, and entered the house.

Dave answered the knock on the front door minutes later. There were two soldiers in dress greens.

“What’s up?” she heard him ask.

Then, “Mary Jo, you need to come here.”

She knew immediately why they had come, and she collapsed on the spot.

Dave Brostrom is a very tall, sandy-haired man with a long, lean face, a slightly crooked smile, and small, deep-set blue eyes. When he talks about Jonathan, sadness seems etched in the lines around those eyes. He moves with an athletic slouch, and his fair skin is weathered from years of island sun. In flip-flops and a flowery silk shirt, he doesn’t look like a military man, but the army has defined his life. Today he works for Boeing, helping to sell helicopters to the army in which he once served.

Jonathan used to tease him about having been an aviator. There was a spirited competition between father and son, whether on surfboards—Dave had taught his sons on a tandem board—or the golf course. When Jonathan decided in his senior year of high school to join the army, it was less about imitating Dave than about showing him up. He was determined to prove himself more of a soldier, setting out to accumulate more badges, more decorations. He would eventually qualify as a paratrooper and complete air-assault training, Ranger School, and dive school. Apart from its overt hierarchy of rank, the army has an elaborate hierarchy of status, in which no position is more revered than that of the “special operator,” the super-soldiers of its covert counterterrorism units. The surest path there was through an elite infantry unit. That was where Jonathan aimed. He viewed his father’s career in aviation dismissively, as a less manly pursuit than foot-soldiering. He enlisted for two extra years in order to guarantee that path. Ordinarily, R.O.T.C. officers-in-training will opt for the extended commitment in order to avoid infantry, where the work is dirty and hard and the hazards immediate, and steer themselves into a cushier specialty … like, say, aviation.

“You volunteered to spend two extra years in the army to go into infantry?” his incredulous father had asked. “That’s stupid!”

“No, it’s not,” said Jonathan. “I don’t want to be a wimp like you. Damn aviator.”

Dave enjoyed this kind of banter with Jonathan, but now the stakes were higher. He cautioned his son. It was one thing to want to show up your old man and prove you were not a wimp, but frontline infantry in wartime was not a step to be lightly taken.

His parents worried about it, but they would support their son’s ambition. Dave in fact did more than that. He helped land his son an immediate berth with an elite airborne unit. He called his old friend Colonel Charles “Chip” Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the regular army’s frontline fighting units, and requested a favor. This was in 2007, just as Jonathan was completing Ranger School … on his third try. He had been assigned to the First Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, a heavy-armored unit that was slated for another tour in Iraq. Dave saw that the 173rd had recently been assigned a second tour in Afghanistan. So the maneuver actually satisfied both of the father’s goals: he had helped move his son closer to his ambition, and he had swung Jonathan’s service out of Iraq and into, as he saw it, the safer of the army’s two theaters of war. Jonathan joined the deployed brigade in Afghanistan. His first assignment was as an assistant at Camp Blessing on the staff of Colonel Ostlund’s Second Battalion, Task Force Rock. Within months he was a platoon leader, commanding a remote outpost known as Bella and exchanging frequent fire with the enemy. He called home excitedly after he was awarded a combat-infantry badge, the army’s official recognition that a soldier has been personally engaged in ground combat.

“Is Dad home?” he asked his mother.

“No, he’s not here right now,” she said.

“Well, I need to talk to him. When will he be home? I got my combat-infantry badge.”

Just then Dave walked in the door. Mary Jo handed him the phone.

“Jonathan needs to talk to you,” she said.

“I got mine!” he told his father. “I got mine!” Rubbing it in. In all his decades of service, Dave had never been in combat.

Dave was happy and proud of him for it. But the father felt another emotion. He worried about what his son had gotten himself into … what he had helped get his son into. There are subtleties to the ideal of courage that occur more readily to older men than young ones, and more to fathers than to sons. The two great errors of youth were to trust too little and to trust too much. A man did what he had to do if necessity demanded it. To do less was cowardice. But to rush headlong toward danger? Wisdom whispered: Better than passing the test is not being put to the test. A wise man avoids the occasion of danger, as capable as he might be of meeting it. He does not risk all for too little. What Jonathan was doing in seeking combat was not foolish to the extent that he trusted in his mission and his leadership. Danger was part of the job. The U.S. Army was in the business of managing risk, and it was good at it. In the modern age, it brought the personnel, equipment, tactics, and training to a fight with such authority that it all but guaranteed mission success, and mission success, especially in America in the modern age, meant, at least in part, no casualties. Well, zero casualties was unrealistic. But minimal casualties. Compared with previous eras, earlier wars, death and severe injury had become blessedly rare for American forces. At the very least a soldier trusted that his commanders would not treat his existence lightly. Dave Brostrom, much as he believed in the army, much as he loved his country, was not as ready as his son to believe that whatever prize was to be had in a godforsaken combat outpost in the Hindu Kush was worth one’s very life. A combat ribbon lent critical authenticity to any infantry officer’s career, but what career would there be if some Taliban bullet found his boy?

A bullet had found Jonathan’s platoon sergeant and friend Matthew Kahler in January, not long after Jonathan took over Second Platoon. The Brostroms got a phone call first from the wife of Colonel Preysler, in Germany. The death of a platoon sergeant is not just a personal tragedy but also an organizational blow. It had shaken everyone in the brigade, up and down the ranks. She told them that Jonathan would be calling home, and when he called, hours later, it was clear to Mary Jo that he had been crying. He said he had to prepare a eulogy, and she wondered, How does a 24-year-old prepare to do a eulogy?

When Dave spoke to his friend Preysler, he asked him if he had been to the outpost to talk with Jonathan and the other men. Preysler said he had not been able to get there. Dave knew enough about informal army protocol to know that when someone as senior as a platoon sergeant went down the commanders came calling to reassure the troops. Preysler hadn’t gone to the outpost, not because he didn’t care but because he was being pulled in too many directions at once.

It cast an ominous shadow. Jonathan would call them by satellite phone every two or three weeks. They were short conversations, usually early in the morning. He would assure them he was all right, then tell them he had to go. It was clear he and his men were under a lot of pressure and were taking regular casualties. His parents found it hard to picture where exactly Jonathan was and what he was doing.

The picture came into clearer focus after Jonathan surprised them by showing up at home for a Mother’s Day party. He appeared at the door that day in May with a bouquet of flowers for Mary Jo. He steered his parents straight to his laptop and called up pictures of his men and some video clips from ABC, which had aired a special months earlier, featuring footage shot by VANITY FAIR writer Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington, about soldiers in a sister company manning outposts in the same region. Jonathan was excited. “Here’s where I work,” he said. It was all new and very cool to him. Dave looked at the videos and had a completely different reaction. He thought, This is some bad shit.

What he saw were young soldiers squatting in makeshift forts in distant mountains risking their lives for reasons he could not fathom. The military side of him came out. He knew all about “COIN,” the army’s counter-insurgency doctrine. It centered on protecting and winning over the population, and it called for soldiers to leave the safety of large bases to mingle with the people where they lived. It was the only rationale he could see for the risks Jonathan and his platoon were taking.

“How often do you relate to the population?” he asked. “What kind of humanitarian assistance do you give them?”

“Nope, we don’t do that anymore,” said Jonathan. “We just try to kill them before they kill us.”

It scared Dave. There was one picture that Jonathan showed them, proudly, which drove it home. He was attending a shura, a conference of elders, with local villagers. The Afghan men around him were wizened figures with long gray beards and leathery skin, survivors, men who had carved out a life for a half-century or more in those harsh mountains despite famine, pestilence, and war. And here, apparently presiding, was his little Jonathan Brostrom, 24 years old, fresh out of army R.O.T.C. at the University of Hawaii, with his high-and-tight, wearing his Oakleys, a wad of chaw bulging in his cheek, trying to look tough. He was just weeks out of Ranger School! He didn’t speak the language. He knew nothing of Afghanistan’s history or culture. One could only imagine how the elders saw his boy.

“You have got to get the hell out of there,” said Dave. “You know, this is stupid. You are spread too thin.”

Jonathan explained that they would soon move from the outpost at Bella. Task Force Rock had inherited the outposts when it arrived in country, and Ostlund had recognized that some of the distant ones made little sense. They would be moving closer to Camp Blessing. So it at least sounded to Dave as if the men in charge shared his concerns. But Jonathan also told him that the enemy at Bella would surely follow them south to the new place, called Wanat.

Jonathan was around for two great weeks in May. Dave spent a lot of time with his son. The Sunday before Jon left, the priest at their church blessed him before the congregation.

Six weeks later he was back in another church, in a coffin. Some of the grieving father’s worries about the mission came out in an interview with a local reporter, but he had nothing but praise for his son’s commanders. He said, “His leadership at the brigade and below were probably the best you’ll ever find, the best in the world, [but] they were put in a situation where they were under-resourced.”

Like the other families of the soldiers killed, the Brostroms were entitled to a copy of the 15–6 investigation of the incident. (The numbers refer to Army Regulation 15, Section 6.) A 15–6 investigation is the army standard. The report included a detailed account of the fight and the events that had led up to it. It emphasized the correctness of the decision to relocate the outpost to Wanat, and the heroism of the men who fought, but it made note of a decision to vacate the unbuilt outpost three days after the battle. It also noted the likely complicity of the village in the attack, and recommended that the Afghan district governor and the chief of police be dismissed, “if not arrested and tried.” It recommended that plans to purchase or lease land for future outposts be streamlined.

In other words, the initial review concluded pretty much what Preysler had told Stars and Stripes a week after the battle: “I would not characterize this as anything more than the standard fighting that happens in this area in good weather that the summer provides.”

And that, apparently, as far as the army was concerned, was that. Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom posthumously received a Silver Star for valor. He was one among many decorated for their actions that day, including Captain Myer, Sergeant Dzwik, and Sergeant Pitts.

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.

His anger began to crystallize only after a careful reading of the 15–6 report. Preysler gave his old friend a redacted version, along with the hundreds of pages of documentation behind it. The deeper Brostrom dug into this material, the more convinced he became that the report was a whitewash. All of his ill-formed misgivings about his son’s mission had been tragically affirmed, and here in the background interviews and documents were the nuts and bolts of a true fiasco. Yet there was not a hint of it in the report itself. The new outpost had been located in a natural kill zone. The engineers who were tasked with building its defenses never showed up. In the first days water ran low, the HESCOs had to be cut in half, and the platoon was so overtasked it could not conduct essential security patrols. The day before the attack, the drones were pulled. There had been direct warnings of a surprise attack. And yet his son had been left out there to run the show. Where was his company commander? Where was the battalion commander?

His overall distress began to distill into something personal. He no longer saw the officers who had led his son to his death as “the best in the world.” They were directly responsible and they had not been paying attention. The mission to Wanat had gone off the rails well before Second Platoon was attacked. Brostrom grew convinced that the army, left to its own devices, wasn’t even going to learn anything from its mistakes. Colonel Preysler, Colonel Ostund, and Captain Myer were going to skate away unscathed.

Anger and second-guessing are common among the bereaved of fallen soldiers. But Dave Brostrom was a special case. His rage, his pain and that of Mary Jo and their family, was not destined to remain a private torment. The retired colonel was formidable. Because of his long military career, he knew exactly what questions to ask, and where to ask them. He had accumulated a lifetime of friends and valued colleagues, in and out of the army, and in the summer of 2008 he began working those levers with a will that would leave no one associated with Wanat untouched.

When his old friend General William Caldwell called to offer his condolences and asked, as friends will, if there was anything he could do, Brostrom had a request ready. He wanted Caldwell to look into the matter further. Jonathan had cut Caldwell’s lawn when his father had served with him at Fort Drum years earlier. The general was now leading the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Lauderdale, which includes the Command and General Staff College, the military’s graduate school, and the Combat Studies Institute (C.S.I.), which collects and publishes contemporary historical studies.

Caldwell honored his old friend’s request. He invited Brostrom to visit Fort Leavenworth to brief the officers at the institute, who were given the redacted 15–6 report along with audio and video recorded by the Apache gunships when they arrived on-site, an hour into the battle. Brostrom shared his misgivings about what had happened with Douglas Cubbison, a military historian who was assigned to write a report on the battle. The two consulted throughout the months of research, and Cubbison showed Brostrom an early draft. This report was clearly not going to be, as Cubbison would later put it to me, “the nice safe hero story” the institute might have imagined at the outset.

When Cubbison’s meticulously researched draft—it was not yet the official C.S.I. report—was leaked, early in 2009, it caused a stir. His report was dramatically written and scathingly critical of the decisions made by officers in frontline command positions.

Cubbison made a powerful case for Brostrom’s take on the battle. It implicated the elite brigade’s entire chain of command in what was characterized as a boondoggle. Second Platoon was portrayed as a victim of its own leadership as much as of the Taliban. It had been thrust into a precarious outpost without proper supervision, defensive precautions, or logistical support. The report portrayed the platoon as a sitting duck. The 10-month-long negotiation to obtain the land for the outpost had given enemy elements in the Waygal Valley ample time to plan a coordinated assault. Lack of overhead surveillance, an inadequate force, delays in construction, the absence of community outreach, the fact that Captain Myer had been too busy to take charge directly until the day before the attack—all of it suggested a distracted and complacent chain of command. Even the mission’s basic goal was miscalculated: “A single platoon in the open field near the bazaar lacked the capability of holding Wanat,” it concluded.

That line would be quoted by Thomas Ricks, the influential military journalist, who caught wind of the C.S.I. report well before it was published and wrote a series of blog posts beginning in early 2009 that focused a great deal of attention back on the battle. Drawn into the emerging story by sources familiar with Brostrom’s campaign, Ricks had already written critically of the 15–6 inquiry, which he saw as the worst kind of self-congratulatory claptrap. He was bothered by what he would term the “fuck-you-edness” of it. He characterized it to me as dismissive, a “thank you very much for your interest in national defense” kind of report, “unusually poor.” He would eventually summarize the entire Cubbison draft.

That draft and Ricks’s critique meant that Brostrom’s complaints could no longer be dismissed as the isolated ravings of a bereaved father. Brostrom now filed a formal complaint with the Department of Defense, accusing the 173rd’s entire chain of command, including his old friend Chip Preysler, of dereliction of duty. He enlisted the help of Robert “Skipp” Orr, the president of Boeing Japan, who had met Jonathan on his last visit home. The executive helped put Brostrom in touch with Virginia senator Jim Webb, a decorated Marine veteran. Webb would bring the issue to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. The senator also advised Brostrom to take his story to the press, which he did to great effect.

The train of research, publicity, and pressure eventually drove the army, in September of 2009, to order an official re-assessment of the battle. General David Petraeus, then the CENTCOM commander and now the director of the C.I.A., enlisted a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, Richard Natonski, to lead the investigation. Its findings would then be submitted to Petraeus, who would sign off on it before forwarding the report for final disposition to General Charles C. “Hondo” Campbell, the soon-to-retire head of the U.S. Army Forces Command.

Four months later Natonski dropped a bomb. He affirmed most of the findings of the Cubbison report. He recommended that Colonel Ostlund and Captain Myer be cited for dereliction of duty. Myer, awarded a Silver Star for the courage he displayed in the fighting at Wanat, would now be reprimanded and punished for his conduct concerning the same encounter. Petraeus went further than Natonski. In signing off on the report, he personally amended the findings to include Colonel Preysler among those deserving reprimand.

If the censures stood, the careers of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer were effectively over. Both Ostlund and Myer had been promoted, to full colonel and to major, respectively, and those promotions would now be rescinded. Preysler, Brostrom’s old friend, who had done him a favor by getting Jonathan assigned to his brigade, resigned before the reprimands were issued. General Jeffrey Schloesser, who had commanded all U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, and who was officially cleared of wrongdoing in the report, also resigned, choosing to share responsibility with his subordinates.

The howl of pain from the slain lieutenant’s father had toppled the chain of command. It had turned the U.S. Army on its head.

Brostrom remembers attending an event in Hawaii in February of 2010, an interment ceremony for a former army chief of staff, and running into General George W. Casey Jr., who then held that position. As Brostrom remembers it, the conversation went like this:

“Listen, I’m so sorry for your family’s loss,” said Casey.

“I’m sorry about all this stuff,” he told Casey.

The general stiffened.

“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

“It doesn’t make me happy,” Brostrom protested.

As Brostrom remembered it, the army chief of staff then leaned in closer, pointed a finger at his chest, and confided cryptically, “Hondo Campbell is going to fix all of this.”

Casey, too, remembers the meeting, but he says he never heard Brostrom apologize for his role in assigning blame for the losses at Wanat. “I would not have expected him to apologize,” Casey told me. “I really felt for him. I saw him standing there—he’s a striking guy, tall, sandy hair—and I recognized him from some of the reporting I had seen about the incident. I walked up to him to express my sorrow over his loss. I could certainly understand his desire to better understand what happened.” Casey insisted he would “never” have said “Whatever makes you happy,” because he felt no umbrage about the ongoing investigation. He had agreed with the decision to order it, and had called Petraeus himself to ask that CENTCOM place the official probe with Natonski, a Marine, to ensure its independence, and to avoid the appearance that the army was investigating itself. He said he has no memory of mentioning Campbell, who had just taken up Natonski’s finding and would soon issue letters of reprimand to Ostlund and Myer. If he had said anything like what Brostrom remembered regarding Campbell, he said, he would have meant only to reassure a grieving father that “Hondo was going to get to the bottom of it.”

III. The Colonel’s Battle

The letter of reprimand Colonel William Ostlund received on March 5, 2010, was a hard slap in the face. “As battalion commander, you failed in several major respects,” General Campbell’s memo began. He went on to itemize four specific and damning findings from the Natonski report: (1) a failure of planning and execution—“You did not provide your soldiers with the guidance, support, and supervision to which they were entitled”; (2) permitting the company commander, Captain Myer, to remain at Camp Blessing for the first four days of construction at Wanat, in order to participate in a 15–6 investigation “in which he was merely a witness”; (3) not inspecting Wanat himself during those days, instead “attending a shura, visiting a community center, and preparing lessons learned”—a long memo to Petraeus outlining the battalion’s experiences over the previous 14 months; and (4) inadequately assessing the risk at Wanat.

Ostlund considered the findings false, from first to last. For an ambitious career army officer, the memo’s conclusion was brutal: “You are reprimanded. Your actions fell below the high standard expected of an experienced, senior officer commanding an infantry battalion in the unforgiving combat environment of Afghanistan. They raise legitimate questions about your judgment, professionalism, leadership, and tactical competence. In a word, they were unacceptable.”

His promotion to full colonel would be withdrawn. He would most likely never lead men into combat again. Campbell noted that he would consider any matters that Ostlund chose to submit “before filing a final decision.” The colonel had 14 days to respond. But resistance seemed likely to prove futile. The resignations of Schloesser and Preysler suggested that, after three separate reviews, the final word on the battle had been pronounced.

Ostlund, however, was not about to go away quietly. He regarded the findings as not just a slur on his reputation but a slur on Chosen Company, which had served so valiantly and at such cost. His company commander, Matt Myer, who had also been reprimanded and reduced in rank, faced the end of his career and a lifelong stain on his judgment and character. Ostlund was still in his early 40s. His career was in rapid stride. He was not about to fall on his sword.

Dave Brostrom had picked a fight with a fighter—a professional fighter. Ostlund is from Nebraska, partly of Cherokee descent, and he joined the army through a delayed-entry enlistment program when he was still a junior in high school. It is all he ever wanted to do. He served four years as an enlisted soldier and two years as a National Guard soldier as he set his sights on becoming an officer. He took advantage of an R.O.T.C. program to attend the University of Omaha, determined to earn a degree faster and with a higher G.P.A. than anyone ever had. He loved the army. As an enlisted man he had observed leaders in uniform who inspired him like no other, and he wanted to be one of them. The speed and excellence with which he “rangered” through college caught the eye of David Petraeus, who throughout his career has worked to spot and nurture ambitious officers who share his scholarly bent. He was selected, on the recommendation of Petraeus, to join the faculty at West Point, which included attendance at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, where he earned a master’s degree in international-security studies. The young officer from Omaha seemed destined for the army’s highest ranks.

Part of his path included combat command. He helped lead the 101st Airborne Brigade into Iraq in 1991, served there again with the 173rd after the 2003 invasion, and eventually took command of Task Force Rock in Afghanistan. Ostlund was highly regarded and indefatigable, with a reputation for pushing himself as hard as his men, for being a “fighting” commander, and for tackling the toughest missions. He appeared to be on a smooth trajectory toward general officer when he was blindsided by Wanat. Reprimanded and reduced in rank, he did not seem bitter, angry, or even frustrated. He seemed focused. He filled an enormous footlocker with thick binders stuffed with thousands of pages of documentation—maps, interviews, memos, articles, passages from army manuals concerning doctrine and practice—as though marshaling research for a doctoral thesis. He regarded the effort as “an obligation.”

Early on, when word of Brostrom’s campaign had first reached him, Ostlund sought advice from a longtime mentor: “Bill, all your life, you’ve clung to facts and truth, and that’s kind of been your mantra, your drumbeat,” his friend said. “But this battle’s not about truth and facts. It’s about politics and perception. And when you realize that, you’ll be more effective in the fight. So, beating your head against the wall about truth and facts at the wrong time is going to send the wrong perception and wrong message to those involved.”

So he had held his fire. How do you fight back against the grieving father of a soldier killed under your command? Ostlund put his faith in the institution. He calmly collected copies of the insulting comments about him that showed up in newspaper stories and television programs. He did not answer them. He showed up with his heavy footlocker for all the interviews demanded by the various investigating teams. He repeated his version of events again and again.

Ostlund is a portrait in contained, channeled energy. He is an extremely fit man, with short, curly black hair, pale-blue eyes, and a square, tightly muscled jaw. Downrange he shaves his head. His manner is ferociously serious: contents under pressure. You want to open a window in case there is an explosion. Jonathan Brostrom was one of 26 men he lost commanding Task Force Rock in Afghanistan. He says he feels every day the loss of each soldier. It’s an emotional issue with him, he says, a reminder of the unbearably high price war exacts. But the colonel shows little emotion about it. It is, he will tell you bluntly—and one senses a conviction here that runs deeper than sorrow—“a fact of combat.” Those who have been there understand, he says. Those who have not cannot.

Task Force Rock under Ostlund’s command was the most decorated unit to serve in the Afghan war. Ostlund had more than a thousand men scattered in 15 combat outposts in the Hindu Kush, spread over an area the size of Delaware. The high mountains and deep valleys made transportation a nightmare. This was, simply, the most difficult terrain and the most violent sector of the war. There were four or five attacks every day in his area of command, attacks that often required battalion assistance—air and artillery power, reinforcements—and Ostlund’s active participation. Among his outposts was Restrepo, which became famous as a result of the documentary film of the same name made by Junger and Hetherington. He moved constantly through the mountains in helicopters and Humvees, from outpost to outpost. The men of Task Force Rock were not fighting just occasionally. They were living combat, day after day, week after week, month after month, in a way few American soldiers have done in generations.

Even as Ostlund was leading his men, he was meeting with village elders throughout the territory—negotiating, listening, settling disputes, organizing aid programs, arguing America’s case, pleading for support. Attending these shuras was not just a polite gesture but a major priority—critical to the battalion’s success. The army, for instance, had made an agreement with Afghanistan that barred troops from simply seizing land for outposts. Land must be purchased or leased. In the case of Wanat, it had taken months of negotiations. The Afghans were regarded as partners in the war, as allies, and under the counterinsurgency doctrine that prevailed, maintaining that relationship was considered the key to winning the war. Sometimes these shuras became urgent, as when an Apache-helicopter attack on two fleeing pickup trucks on July 4, just nine days before the Battle of Wanat, had killed a local doctor and other workers from a medical clinic. The task force had been subjected to mortar fire from the fleeing group—the medical personnel may have been taken hostage by Taliban fighters—but the fallout from that event had turned many in the Waygal Valley against the entire American effort. Such disputes cut to the core of Ostlund’s mission.

Because Afghanistan in 2008 was an “economy of force” effort, it meant that Task Force Rock faced constant shortages of engineers, aircraft, humanitarian dollars—everything. Iraq was still draining most of America’s military resources. For Ostlund, this affected his entire command. He was shorthanded. He was always shuffling things among outposts—TOW firing platforms, mortars, artillery, surveillance drones—moving them to where they were most needed, trying to anticipate where the enemy, cunning and largely invisible, would next strike. His intelligence staff carefully plotted the daily attacks, noting the size of the enemy force and the kinds of weapons and tactics used. But the enemy was smart, too. When Ostlund arrived in country in the spring of 2007, one of his first decisions was to pull back and consolidate. Collapsing Ranch House and Bella to Wanat was meant to close two of the most far-flung outposts, which could be reached only by helicopter and were, as Jonathan Brostrom had told his father, too vulnerable and understaffed to conduct any kind of community outreach. Wanat was chosen because it was a district center and because it was close enough to Camp Blessing to be reinforced by road. These advantages were judged to outweigh the danger of residing in the bottom of a bowl.

Factoring into that calculation was the fact that Wanat, and the entire Waygal Valley, was one of the least violent sectors in Ostlund’s battle theater. Over the entire deployment, the task force experienced only 44 clashes with the enemy there. It had more than 500 in the Korengal Valley. The same parcel of ground where COP Kahler was to be built had been occupied earlier in the war by an American engineering unit that encountered little or no hostility. It had built a bridge that was considered a boon to the village. The planning for the new outpost had included detailed maps and construction schedules, including pre-determined fields of fire and potential locations for observation posts on the high ground. In April, after leasing the land, Ostlund, Myer, and Brostrom had visited Wanat for a shura with the village elders. None expressed objections to the outpost. The American officers had together walked the grounds. Two days before the move to Wanat, Ostlund had met with Brostrom to discuss the operation further. He said he found the lieutenant eager to proceed.

Intelligence reports predicted that Kahler would be particularly vulnerable in the first few days, before effective defensive measures were established. So Ostlund took steps to beef up Brostrom’s platoon, re-allocating the TOW-missile vehicle, the 120-mm. and 60-mm. mortars, and multiple surveillance systems from other outposts. With these the platoon would have five vehicles, including two with heavy machine guns, two with grenade launchers, 49 U.S. soldiers, and two dozen Afghans. Intelligence estimates and aerial surveillance indicated that a series of light probing attacks were likely, and that the force deployed was more than capable of defending itself. This may have figured into Brostrom’s calculations when he proved willing to sacrifice some situational awareness in the first days by using his men to build instead of patrol.

On the day of the move from Bella, a complicated effort which had to be orchestrated on land and in the air, two of Ostlund’s other outposts were attacked. Aerial surveillance was withdrawn from Wanat, over the task force’s objections, because there was judged to be more pressing need elsewhere.

On the day before the platoon rolled into Wanat, a Task Force Rock soldier was killed in the Chowkay Valley. Ostlund attended a shura that day, and visited the men in the unit that suffered the loss. When the arrival of combat engineers and supplies at Wanat was delayed, because of threats along the road from Camp Blessing, arrangements were made to deliver additional supplies to Brostrom by air. Two or more attacks on Task Force Rock outposts came in each of the following days. Meanwhile, Ostlund was also coordinating a visit to his area of operations by Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was present with Mullen when an outpost they were visiting was attacked. Scheduled to visit Wanat in the days before the battle, he was prevented from doing so because the road from Camp Blessing had not been cleared—the same problem stranding the engineers—and the choppers were grounded. Nevertheless, reports from Lieutenant Brostrom indicated that the work was proceeding as planned, despite the setbacks. Myer arrived on the afternoon of the 12th to assume direct command, and his reports confirmed that all was quiet. Viewed in the larger context of his command, it was hard to conclude that Ostlund was not working overtime to manage his battle space with limited resources.

The attack that began on the morning of July 13, and that ended so tragically, came as a surprise and constituted a betrayal. Later investigations showed that the same villagers who had received Ostlund, Myer, and Brostrom in a friendly way just weeks earlier had helped Taliban fighters gather the weapons, ammunition, and men to sustain the assault. Ostlund argued consistently that it is a commander’s duty to prepare for likely threats. An all-out coordinated attack like the one at Wanat had happened only once before during his command, at Ranch House, and had been repelled by the half-platoon based there. The ability of the enemy to enlist village support, amass stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, and gather hundreds of fighters for a concentrated and sustained assault was highly unlikely, which is why the forces attacking Wanat had achieved surprise and were able to inflict such damage.

To respond to Campbell’s letter of reprimand, Ostlund dug back into the same trunk of facts he had presented to Natonski’s investigators, only this time he carefully organized that evidence to address, point by point, the report’s findings. He believed that anyone who weighed the evidence fairly could reach only one conclusion: he and his fellow officers had been wrongly chastised. “Either the decision would be made on the basis of the facts or it would be politically driven,” he said. He met with Campbell for an hour and a half on April 14, 2010. The general also heard from Colonel Preysler and Captain Myer. Two months later, General Campbell completely reversed himself.

Ostlund’s reprimand was revoked, utterly, as were Preysler’s and Myer’s. The second memo to Ostlund from the general is a study in throwing a speeding train violently into reverse. “I withdraw, cancel, and annul the reprimand because it does not reflect the totality of the facts as now known,” he wrote. Campbell found that the earlier probe had focused too narrowly on the events of the battle itself, and had failed to adequately consider the context of Ostlund’s command. He wrote, “My review led me to believe that you, CPT Myer, and COL Preysler [exercised] a degree of care that a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances. To criminalize command decisions in a theater of complex combat operations is a grave step indeed. It is also unnecessary, particularly in this case.”

Campbell’s was the last word on the investigation. The best that could have been realistically hoped for was leniency—that he would weigh the errors of Wanat against the entirety of the reprimanded soldiers’ careers and decide that the charge of dereliction was too harsh. But Campbell went way past that. He erased and debunked every single criticism of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer.

Citing the complete evidence and testimony offered by the officers, and particularly by Ostlund—all of which had been available to earlier investigators—Campbell wrote, “You can say that my interpretation of your decisions and actions evolved There is no such thing as a perfect decision in war, where complexity, friction, uncertainty, the interlocking effects of the actions of independent individuals, and the enemy all affect the outcome of events.” He went on, “That U.S. casualties occurred at Wanat is true. However, they did not occur as a result of deficient decisions, planning, and actions of the entire chain of command In battle, casualties are inevitable. Regrettably, they are often the price of victory.”

IV. Aftermath

Captain Matthew Myer didn’t do much to defend himself. When he saw the extraordinary effort Ostlund was making, he put his faith in his commander and in the army. Myer has a taciturn self-assurance that struck some of the army investigators as smug, but he is the son of an infantry officer and in the last decade has seen far more combat than most of the officers judging him. He is inclined to let his conduct speak for itself.

He had personally supervised Second Platoon’s hazardous move from Bella and had been the last to leave. Instead of immediately joining Brostrom and the men at Wanat, he had flown on to Camp Blessing, where he had been directed to answer the questions of army investigators looking into the Apache attack of July 4 that had caused such a stir. Myer was not just a “witness,” as the original reprimand had pointedly stated—he was the central figure. He had cleared the targets for attack. The deaths had colored perceptions of the American effort throughout the Waygal, so getting the facts out was urgent; indeed, later critiques of the Battle of Wanat pointed to the Apache attacks as a possible cause of local hostility that apparently aided the Taliban attackers. When he finished testifying, Myer left for Wanat on the first available transport, bringing water and supplies with him. He had arrived the afternoon before the battle. He had been, in the words of Sergeant Dzwik, “exactly where he needed to be when he needed to be there.”

In June of 2010, at about the same time that Ostlund, Myer, and Preysler were receiving letters from Campbell in which he withdrew the reprimands, family members of the men killed in the battle gathered at Fort McPherson, in Georgia, to be briefed by both Natonski and Campbell about the CENTCOM investigation. They knew nothing of Campbell’s about-face. They were expecting something grimly ceremonial: a detailed accounting of the mistakes the CENTCOM investigation had documented, and then to have, as it were, the heads of the three officers most directly responsible for the deaths of their sons and husbands handed to them on a plate. The event was heavy with grief but electric with anger and indignation.

Natonski briefed first. He walked the families through the details of the battle. He noted the good intentions of everyone involved but pronounced his detailed, damning judgments of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer. It was as though the U.S. Army, through this retired Marine lieutenant general, was humbling itself before the families, admitting that its leadership errors had contributed to their losses—in a sense, apologizing. It went on for more than two hours, and the family members found it cathartic. Dave Brostrom felt as though he and the others had finally achieved some “closure.”

Then, after a short break, General Campbell appeared. He told the audience that this was going to be yet another “difficult day,” and then stunned them with his verdict. The audience sat in silence as he explained the authority he had been given by the secretary of the army to pronounce judgment, walked them through the procedure he followed, and explained his decision.

“The officers listed in the report had exercised due care in the performance of their duties,” he said. “These officers did not kill your sons. The Taliban did.”

The silence lasted for a few moments more. Then Brostrom erupted. He made an effort to control his anger, but his voice rose to a shout: “Nine soldiers dead and 27 wounded!” He repeated the findings of the Natonski report that had just been officially presented—lack of resources, manpower, equipment, supervision. “No risk mitigation!,” Brostrom shouted. “You tell me what the battalion commander did to mitigate those risks! … If he was too busy taking care of 13 other outposts, then why in the hell did they go there in the first place?”

He was interrupted by applause from other family members.

“It’s because nobody had the balls to say, Don’t do it!” said Brostrom. “There is no excuse. Things were going wrong. Nobody took any action … they left those kids out there to be slaughtered!”

“I can absolutely understand your emotion,” said Campbell.

“You can’t,” answered Brostrom. “You didn’t lose a son.”

Campbell held his ground, and the session devolved further. Brostrom remarked to one of the other shocked family members, “This is a nightmare.” He went on to accuse Campbell, who had bucked the findings of the entire chain of command in arriving at his opinion, of acting as a toady for the army.

“You were told to soften this to the United States Army, and that’s exactly what happened here,” he said. “You went out and did your own investigation and came up with totally 180-degree-out findings I didn’t send my son to Afghanistan to be executed!”

His wrath toward Ostlund boiled over. Ostlund had not only led their sons “to slaughter” but had set back the American effort in that part of Afghanistan by “two or three years.” Ostlund was a narcissist, a war-lover, and a coward, who stayed safely behind the defenses of his command post while pushing his men to take unnecessary risks in order to win his unit medals and glory. Campbell countered that the record showed just the opposite, that Task Force Rock had been superbly led.

“I know this guy, and he is going to do it again,” Brostrom said.

In fact, the two men have never met. They spoke on the phone several times soon after his son’s death, when Ostlund offered to answer any questions about the episode, and during that same period they had exchanged several e-mails. But Brostrom’s contacts had ended when he began his campaign.

The Battle of Wanat has become the most exhaustively examined episode of the Afghan war. Whatever lessons can be learned from it have been extracted. Ostlund has been fully reinstated, and recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan as commander of the Joint Special Operations unit responsible for covert raids on Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership. It was a central post at a very high level in the Afghan campaign. He served directly with David Petraeus, so the Wanat episode had not yet hobbled his standing in the army. In the long run, it probably will. Any ambitions Ostlund may have had for general officer are gone. There are scores of eligible colonels for every general-officer slot, and the cloud raised by Brostrom’s charges will linger despite Ostlund’s official vindication. Ostlund is currently completing a fellowship at Tufts University and has hopes of rejoining the special-operations command. “I will continue to serve until the army tells me to go home,” he said, “as it very nearly did two years ago.”

Matthew Myer is now Major Myer. He was inspired by his experience to stay in the army, despite whatever shadow it casts over his reputation. “Look, the army could’ve flicked me away easily,” he said. “Nobody would have even said anything. They would’ve been like, ‘Yeah, who was that guy again? I don’t know.’ Because the army’s just this huge machine. I would be replaced handily. Yet hours and hours of time were put into [evaluating the charges against] Captain Myer and Colonel Ostlund, because I think leaders cared about us. Their values point to doing what is right, not just what is easy.”

For Dave Brostrom, the story would only get worse. When the Combat Studies Institute released the final version of its history of the battle, it had substantially re-written Cubbison’s first draft. Gone were the criticisms of the command decisions to locate and supply the outpost at Wanat, and gone were suggestions that the brigade command had botched the operation. If any American officer had made fatal mistakes at Wanat, it now concluded, it was in fact Brostrom’s son. In the final C.S.I. study, instigated by his father, Lieutenant Brostrom is faulted, always indirectly—the report uses the term “platoon leadership”—for the placement of Topside, and for failing to utilize the Afghan soldiers at the outpost to conduct patrols, which might have alerted the platoon to massing enemy forces. Senior officers who pored over details of the battle believe the lieutenant’s most serious mistake may have been not complaining about Second Platoon’s vulnerability. He did not, as an infantry officer would say, “shoot up the red star cluster,” demanding more help from his company commander when things had started to go wrong. Brostrom had chosen to work with the men and equipment he had and make the best of it, an understandable decision but in retrospect one that proved fatally wrong.

So the investigation Dave Brostrom set in motion has ended by tarnishing the memory of his son’s leadership. Brostrom is now battling the C.S.I. to again amend its report. And he has not given up his pursuit of Bill Ostlund. This summer he filed a motion seeking the colonel’s personal correspondence from the period in question. Ostlund has refused to provide it.

No one has been left unsullied by the protracted and painful effort to dissect what happened at Wanat. Who, apart from a determined enemy, is to blame for the 9 American soldiers dead and 27 wounded? Do we blame the lieutenant who, working with limited resources, failed to adequately scout the area around the compound or place effective observation posts? Do we blame the captain who chose to obey orders to answer questions in an official investigation instead of hurrying to man the new outpost a day earlier? Do we blame the lieutenant colonel who was forced to spread his own efforts over 15 widely scattered outposts, and to constantly shuffle men and mortars and missile systems and observation drones between them in an ever changing landscape of attacks? Do we blame the generals who accepted this historically impossible mission and tried to achieve it with forces and resources stretched thin? Or do we blame the Bush administration for trying to do too much at the same time? Do we blame an ever hopeful America for its historic tendency to overreach?

Brostrom, for one, feels strongly where the blame ought to go. He is convinced that Campbell’s about-face was a cover-up, pure and simple—an instance of the army closing ranks around its own. “The fix was in,” he says, referring back to the comments he believes he heard from General Casey in Hawaii, the conversation that Casey remembers differently. The Brostroms’ anger and suspicion continue even as their second son, Blake, serves as an army helicopter pilot. Casey, who retired in April, remains troubled by Wanat. He said that he has been asked several times at speaking engagements to name something that he regrets from his service as chief of staff. Each time he has mentioned Wanat. He feels that after the battle the army bungled its responsibility to the families of those killed, and “lost” some of them. He says “some,” but he is thinking particularly of Dave Brostrom.

There is one thing about the Battle of Wanat that will forever remain beyond reproach. At the worst of the fight, Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom ran to the point of greatest danger and died to help his men.